


Lack of Color

by yorkisms



Series: Lifeline Week '17 [3]
Category: Lifeline (Video Game 2015)
Genre: Canon-typical topics, Colors, Gen, character introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 12:19:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10808883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yorkisms/pseuds/yorkisms
Summary: White is anachromatic color, a color without hue. Light with a spectral composition that stimulates all three types of the color sensitive cone cells of the human eye in nearly equal amounts appears white. White is one of the most common colors in nature, the color of sunlight, and the color of sunlight reflected by snow, milk, chalk, limestone and other common minerals.Or: Five (heh) times Adams saw something white, and one time he saw a different color.





	Lack of Color

**Author's Note:**

> Lifeline week day 3! Green series or white series!! 
> 
> If I haven't made it obvious, I'm here for all the whiteout love. So here's a piece about all the, well, white in whiteout. 
> 
> _If you feel discouraged_   
>  _When there's a lack of color here_   
>  _Please don't worry lover_   
>  _It's really bursting at the seams_   
>  _From absorbing everything, the spectrums A to Z_

I. White is the first thing he sees when he wakes up.

The sky is white. Pale, bright, unflinching white. He squints against the light and sits up slowly. 

The snow is white. It stretches out for miles around him and he has to squint before searching his body and fortunately finding ski goggles pushed up on his head that he can pull down in order to mute the tones of blinding white that are drilling into his eyes. 

He doesn’t have a name yet. He can’t remember anything. He hears something beeping in the snow. 

Somewhere deep within all that white, white, white. 

He digs for a few minutes before finding the source. 

Some sort of communicator. He turns it over, examining the buttons. 

“Hello? Anybody there?” 

He’s numb from lying in the snow, but as he warms up he realizes how sore he is. 

“I think I had an accident. Please help.” 

Only soft white noise replies. He sighs.

“Can you read me?” 

White noise. 

White, white, white.

“I repeat, can you read me?”

“..es...ut...ton of...atic.”

His face lights up. Brilliant. 

“Let me try something. Give me a few seconds.”

 

II. White is what he sees in the first shelter.

It’s the papers. They’re scattered, and most are piled in the center of the room. Like the snow outside, they’re piercingly white, white, white. 

They’re cut through with dirty bits, but still.

He inspects the pile of papers. 

It turns out they do nothing but make him feel like a dunce-  there’s chart after chart after chart that doesn’t really make much sense, but they stir some sort of nagging feeling in the back of his skull.

He can’t make anything of them, though. One by one, he crumples the papers- hopefully they didn’t have any scientific breakthroughs on them- and throws them into the wood-burning oven that’s in the corner. 

Once he gets the fire lit, he watches the papers turn from white to brown to charred black.

He entertains himself with it for a while before he has to sleep. He’s tired. He aches in every bone. 

When he starts to dream, it’s just about snow. 

Snow everywhere.

White, white, white.

 

III. White is what he sees in the storm.

The snow almost seems like it’s rising up instead of falling, like he’s angered some sort of primal nature god. 

Blue is gone. He can’t move. The snow is so deep he can barely walk. He’s staring up at the sky, curled in on himself, and all he sees is a white vortex. 

Nature, he thinks, is about to try and kill him. This is it. 

This is going to be the last thing he sees before he dies. His hands are numb, his arms are numb, and he thinks his feet are actually starting to feel slightly warm. 

He looks up at the blinding white. White. White. 

He knows it might just be that he's starting to crack, but maybe this isn't a bad way to go out. A world ending in ice. 

For all he knows, this storm of white snow is swallowing the whole earth. It certainly feels like it. 

But at the same time, it's beautiful.

His hands are frozen place. His legs are so numb that they're starting to turn warm.

The white snow is piled up to his shins. He could move, but it would take so much energy, and he can't see anything but white. 

He's dangerously close to giving up and letting the cold be the thing that kills him.

He feels something hit him in the leg. 

“Blue!” 

He grabs the dog by the collar and lets the dog pull him away through the thick piles of snow. 

Mounds upon mounds of white. 

Adams wonders if one day all this white- snow, sky, everything- is going to drive him blind.

 

IV. White is what he sees when he opens his eyes after they knock him out.

The walls are all reflective white and the floors are concrete and it takes him a moment to remember what happened. 

The hydroelectric plant. Four. The gas.  _ Fuck. _

Adams staggers to his feet, putting one hand over his face to stem the bloody nose. 

His friend. They must be worried sick. Adams searches himself for the communicator as if his life depends on it. 

“Are you...there? Damn, my head is pounding...everything is blurry…” 

Adams leans up against the wall for relief from his dizziness and slides down as a slightly staticky reply comes. 

“Adams! Are you all right?” 

He almost snarls, but out of irritation with the situation, not with them.

“No, I’m not OK! Ugh-- what did they do to me? They must have sedated me.” His stomach turns- violently. “That explains the nausea.” 

He chokes, eyes widening for a moment. “Oh god-- speaking of- I’m gonna- uh- excuse me a s-”

He can’t finish the sentence because he turns off the mic and vomits immediately all over the pristine white paneling between the wall and floor. 

If he gets out of this, he thinks, he’s gonna just  _ hate _ the color white.

 

V. White is what he sees when he enters the laboratory.

White tiles, white countertops, white tiles, white and glass machine. The only pops of color are the chemicals against it. There’s white chemical cabinets with symbols Adams barely only recognizes due to their simplicity. Corrosive, flammable, acidic.

(Those, fortunately, are yellow and black.)

He had expected something warmer- maybe, for once in his miserable life to not see the same fucking color- or lack of color- every minute of every hour of every day. 

Unfortunately, the laboratory isn’t physically cold, but emotionally so. The place...lacks a soul, Adams thinks. 

If he had come here to find a kind god, the room might have reflected such a thing. 

But for him there is no kind god. There is just this man.

This man in his brushed chrome motorized wheelchair and his platinum oxygen tanks and white mask, white tubes, white, white, white.

This man wants him to be a part of the lab. Forever. Give in to it. Give in to  _ him. _

Maybe, he thinks dryly in order to mute the horror as Sibellius talks, the doctor thought that if Adams saw enough white over the first three days of his life he’d crack and hand over the body. 

As fucking if that would ever happen. Dr Sibellius made a mistake when he built Adams stubborn. 

The white is blinding. It's invading his senses, now, more than ever before. Clean white, and the antiseptic smell that accompanies such things- he hates it. It sets him on edge. 

"What do you say, Adams? Let's advance humanity together!" 

He realizes that this man is terrifying. He is at the center of all the white. He's power mad, he would do anything at this point to stay alive.

He's already resorted to torture.

Adams steels his nerves and does the most dangerous thing he’s ever managed.

He says  _ no. _

 

VI. Green is what he sees when he drives for long enough.

Green.  _ Green. _ Dark green of the first trees he’s ever seen- conifers, he thinks, he can’t tell all evergreens apart. Eventually, he sees the lighter green of moss growing on trees, he sees the brown of bark and dirt, and he starts to see the bright oranges and reds of wildflowers growing on the side of the road. 

He’s driven for so long that he can’t help but pull over and look at the woods. Look at the flowers. Pinkish red at the tips of the petals, turning orange as they move inwards. Small blue buds on another. Purple-pink tubes. 

Adams thinks this is the most color he has ever seen in his life, this field of wildflowers on the side of the road somewhere in the universe he can’t even pinpoint. 

He looks at the first flower he examined- red, red, red. 

He gently feels the petals.

“It’s beautiful.” 

For once, he lives in a world with an absence of that migraine inducing white, white, white.


End file.
